Martin O'Neill is set to face former side Aston Villa as he leads his Nottingham Forest team out at the City Ground tonight.

The Forest legend was handed an 18 month contract at Forest and has had a good start to life in the East Midlands.

His new charges are in direct competition with Villa for that final Championship playoff place.

It's almost a decade since O'Neill left Villa, but the 66-year-old Irishman remains a divisive character when it comes to the claret and blue faithful.

Reprising a piece from the Birmingham Live archives, football editor Mat Kendrick looks back at why:

The Martin O'Neill legacy

Once he was the ‘Messiah’, now it’s a whole lot messier.

Set against the current claret and blue backdrop of Aston Villa's agonising demise, the latter seasons of an eventful Martin O’Neill chapter seem like halcyon days by comparison.

Wembley appearances, European football, Champions League challenges, half a team of England internationals, a steady stream of £5million-£12million signings, a win ratio of more than 40 per cent... blimey, he even invited fans to dinner after one match.

There was the triumph at the Emirates which triggered a record-breaking run of away wins, the 5-1 over Blues which triggered a record-breaking run of factory-floor banter.

The semi-final six-goal drubbing of Blackburn, the UEFA Cup conquering of Ajax, the historic Old Trafford triumph, the Villa Park chastening of Chelsea.

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There was Martin Laursen at his finest, Gareth Barry at his best, James Milner coming of age, Ashley Young, John Carew, Brad Friedel et al.

Proven Premier League stars.

O’Neill deserved credit – the big question was whether he deserved many more millions of pounds worth of credit than he was generously afforded by Randy Lerner.

Their partnership’s push for the top four was reminiscent of a parent taking an excitable young child to an amusement arcade to play those penny falls machines.

You know the ones, where you stick a coin in the slot and it drops on to those moving shelves.

If your timing’s right all the coppers get pushed over the edge, cascade down and you’re quids in. Randy gave Martin a couple of coins and when a handful more dropped, he was gripped.

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We all were.

Seeing how much fun it was, Randy stuck his hand in his pocket a few more times – quite a few more times, to be honest – to find a few more pennies – quite a few more pennies – but Martin wanted more. Just a few more.

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Leaving just FIVE DAYS before the start of the 2010-11 season was a perfect exit strategy by O’Neill in terms of self preservation. For all the mock modesty, O’Neill is possessed with total self-belief. If he, of all people, couldn’t do the job without the handful of under-utilised, over-paid reserves Lerner wanted him to move on, what hope did any mere mortal of a manager have?

By tendering his resignation so late he was putting his successor at an immediate disadvantage and making his own achievements sparkle ever brighter by comparison (and, boy, does knocking on the door of the Champions League seem shiny compared to being stuck in the middle of the Championship).

The writing had been on the wall since the previous spring, but only O’Neill will know what forced him out in early August 2010 rather than at the end of the previous campaign. From the outside looking it, it appeared to have been prompted by his first real failure to get his own way and the first time the board refused to bow to his demands.

The Martin O’Neill memoirs will make intriguing reading...

Anyway, a boss with three successive sixth-place finishes, a Carling Cup final and FA Cup semi-final sitting freshly atop his CV wasn’t going to risk his stock slipping, especially while there would be chairmen who would associate the 666 with his Premier League positions rather than his reprehensible resignation.

Alas, his and Villa's stock have slipped alarmingly since then anyway.

As a manager he might have maintained his reputation, but as a man he lost many admirers, Lerner, unsurprisingly, chief among them.

Now it is eight-a-half years since O’Neill left Villa and of the regrets he and Lerner have harboured in that time the greatest must surely be that a duo once hailed as the model manager-chairman combo failed to reach a compromise.

A penny for O’Neill’s thoughts (or £120million) when his Forest team face Villa at the City Ground on March 13.

The jack-in-the-box boss must be tinged with sadness about the way he leapt from the Villa Park hotseat.

He left in such haste he barely had a chance to clear his desk (it wouldn’t be a surprise to find Moustapha Salifou still stowed away in a filing cabinet).

Even though the claret and blue faithful have yearned for the upper echelons of the Premier League in the intervening years, the Villa board at the time did not miss their ex-employee’s all-controlling ego.

Many observers questioned whether O'Neill would ever get a better crack at top-end success than the opportunity he stormed out on.

The answer was a resounding no.

He's back at Forest now via an uninspiring spell at Sunderland and a stint as the Republic of Ireland boss that ran out of steam.

Following in the City Ground footsteps of his great managerial mentor Brian Clough was too enticing to turn down and it represents a fantastic challenge for O'Neill.

But at 66, time would seem to be running out for him to land the elite job he believes is his destiny.

Meanwhile, Villa can’t help but wonder what might have been had the give-and-take been shared out equally between Lerner and O’Neill.

It was a missed opportunity that would make even Emile Heskey blush.

Which brings us finally to O’Neill’s transfer record. For every Milner and Young, there was a Wayne Routledge, a Curtis Davies, a Steve Sidwell and a Shaun Maloney, more often than not warming the bench rather than gracing the pitch.

Indeed, there was a single weekend back in April 2012 - around the time he made his first Villa Park return with Sunderland - when the contrasting fortunes of two of O’Neill's most notorious Villa buys neatly summed up the disparities of his wheeling and dealing.

While one of his ‘misses’, Habib Beye, was tumbling towards League One with Doncaster, one of his ‘hits’, Ashley Young, was tumbling towards the top-flight title with Manchester United.

The claret and blue faithful can forgive him the bad Beyes and appreciate the good buys, but it was the lack of a proper goodbye which still rankles with fans who invested in him as heavily as the chairman did, especially given Aston Villa's unforgivable fall from grace since then.